What Happened to Yahoo
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</td > August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world.
</td> 2010 年 8 月 雅虎 1998 年收购了我们的初创公司，当我去雅虎工作时，感觉那里就像是世界的中心。
It was supposed to be the next big thing.
这应该是下一件大事。
It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.
谷歌本来应该是这样的。
What went wrong?
出了什么问题？
The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time,
困扰雅虎的问题可以追溯到很久以前
practically to the beginning of the company.
几乎到了公司成立之初。
They were already very visible when I got there in 1998.
当我 1998 年到达那里时，它们已经非常明显了。
Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
雅虎有两个谷歌没有的问题：赚钱容易，以及作为一家科技公司的矛盾心理。
Money The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
金钱 我第一次见到杨致远时，我们以为我们见面是出于不同的原因。
He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us.
他以为我们正在见面，这样他就可以在购买我们之前亲自查看我们的情况。
I thought we were meeting so we
我以为我们会见面所以我们
could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop.
可以向他展示我们的新技术，Revenue Loop。
It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
这是一种对购物搜索结果进行排序的方式。
Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but by the bid times the average amount a user would buy.
商家按销售额的一定比例出价以获得流量，但结果不是按出价排序，而是按出价乘以用户平均购买金额排序。
It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
这就像谷歌现在用来对广告进行排序的算法，但那是在 1998 年春天，谷歌成立之前。
Revenue Loop was the optimal sort for shopping search, in the sense
从某种意义上说，收入循环是购物搜索的最佳排序
that it sorted in order of how much money Yahoo would make from each link.
它按照雅虎从每个链接中赚多少钱的顺序排序。
But it wasn't just optimal in that sense.
但从这个意义上来说，这不仅仅是最佳的。
Ranking search results by user behavior also makes search better.
按用户行为对搜索结果进行排名也可以使搜索变得更好。
Users train the search: you can start out finding matches based on mere textual similarity, and as users buy more stuff the search results get better and better.
用户训练搜索：您可以开始仅根据文本相似性来查找匹配项，并且随着用户购买更多的东西，搜索结果会变得越来越好。
Jerry didn't seem to care.
杰瑞似乎并不在意。
I was confused.
我很困惑。
I was showing him
我正在给他看
technology that extracted the maximum value from search traffic, and he didn't care?
从搜索流量中提取最大价值的技术，他不在乎？
I couldn't tell whether I was explaining it badly, or he was just very poker faced.
我不知道是我解释得不好，还是他只是面无表情。
I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo.
直到后来我去雅虎工作后，我才意识到答案。
It was neither of my guesses.
这都不是我的猜测。
The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
雅虎之所以不关心提取流量全部价值的技术，是因为广告商已经为此付出了过高的代价。
If Yahoo merely extracted
如果雅虎只是提取
the actual value, they'd have made less.
实际价值，他们会赚得更少。
Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
尽管现在很难相信，但当时的大笔收入却来自于横幅广告。
Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads.
广告商愿意为横幅广告支付高得离谱的费用。
So Yahoo's sales force had evolved to exploit this source of revenue.
因此，雅虎的销售队伍已经发展到利用这一收入来源。
Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
在一位名叫阿尼尔·辛格（Anil Singh）的大人物的领导下，雅虎的销售人员会飞到宝洁公司（Procter & Gamble），带着数百万美元的横幅广告订单回来。
The prices seemed cheap compared to print, which was what advertisers, for lack of any other reference, compared them to.
与印刷品相比，价格似乎便宜，广告商在缺乏任何其他参考的情况下将其与印刷品进行比较。
But they were expensive compared to what they were worth.
但与它们的价值相比，它们的价格昂贵。
So these big, dumb companies were a dangerous source of revenue to depend on.
因此，这些大而愚蠢的公司是一个危险的收入来源。
But there was another source even more dangerous: other Internet startups.
但还有另一个更危险的来源：其他互联网初创公司。
By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme.
到 1998 年，雅虎成为事实上的庞氏骗局的受益者。
Investors were excited about the Internet.
投资者对互联网感到兴奋。
One reason they were
他们的原因之一是
excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
令人兴奋的是雅虎的收入增长。
So they invested in new Internet startups.
因此他们投资了新的互联网初创公司。
The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic.
然后，初创公司用这笔钱在雅虎上购买广告以获得流量。
Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in.
这为雅虎带来了更多的收入增长，并进一步让投资者相信互联网值得投资。
When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
有一天，当我意识到这一点时，坐在我的小隔间里，我像阿基米德在浴缸里一样跳了起来，只不过不是“尤里卡！”我大喊“卖！”
Both the Internet startups and the Procter & Gambles were doing brand advertising.
互联网初创公司和宝洁公司都在做品牌广告。
They didn't care about targeting.
他们并不关心目标。
They just wanted lots of people to see their ads.
他们只是想让很多人看到他们的广告。
So traffic became the thing to get at Yahoo.
因此，流量就成了雅虎获取流量的关键。
It didn't matter what type.
什么类型并不重要。
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